Printed Chess

[TomChivers]

I would like advice on how to print out chess scores along with analysis and diagrams on to paper, and to make it look nice - magazine or book nice.

I would be most grateful for any advice or ideas!

[A bit of background for those curious. I hope to make a scrapbook of my games so that I can actually remember them. Atm I have a pile of my own paper scoresheets, and an unreliable database of some of my games, but I would like to consolidate these into a nice, neat printed record. I don't mean to make a book or magazine - just single A4 printed sheets into a folder. I have Rybka 3.0 with Aquarium, and somewhere an old Fritz and old chessbase. I have tried using the printing options with Rybka 3.0 - and tried before with the chessbase products - and whilst I manage to get something out, it doesn't look remotely professional.]

[Ian Kingston]

ChessBase has the facility to output a game (or games) to an RTF file, which can be opened by any word processor or page layout program. There are lots of options for the output, so you may need to experiment to get what you want.

Once you have the RTF files, you can play around with them in Word/OpenOffice/whatever to make it look as good as you need. Personally, I'd stay away from Word - it's a nightmare to control when dealing with anything remotely complex.

For truly professional results you should probably use InDesign (market leader), Quark Xpress or Ventura, but the cost of these programs can be prohibitive. Sadly, free/open source page layout software is of very poor quality in general. If you have a strong masochistic streak you could investigate LaTeX - it's free and capable of excellent results, but very hard to use.

[Jon D'Souza-Eva]

I just use OpenOffice (free alternative to Microsoft Office) with the free Chess Alpha font (*). The advantage of using a font rather than an image for the diagrams is that they can be resized easily.

To create the diagrams I have a template document containing a blank board which I copy and paste into my new document. I have a little crib sheet which contains the mapping of letters to chess pieces which I stick on top of my monitor. With this I can create a diagram from scratch in a minute or two. A handy tip - press the "Insert" key on the keyboard so that anything you type overwrites the character underneath (i.e. a blank square) rather than inserting a new character.

(*) See http://www.enpassant.dk/chess/fonteng.htm. To install a font on Windows, you normally need to copy it to C:\Windows\Fonts, but some versions of Windows allow you to right click the font file and select "Install".

[Ian Kingston]

I just use OpenOffice (free alternative to Microsoft Office) with the free Chess Alpha font (*). The advantage of using a font rather than an image for the diagrams is that they can be resized easily.

Diagrams copied from ChessBase automatically use the fonts supplied with ChessBase. I don't know whether they map to the same characters as free fonts. The commercial Linotype chess font uses completely different letters for the pieces.

[Richard Thursby]

If you have a strong masochistic streak you could investigate LaTeX - it's free and capable of excellent results, but very hard to use.

Everything's relative when you've used it for university mathematics! I have dabbled with it a little bit for chess, having recently used it to produce a new poster for my club. Its clear advantage is in the area of editing, but you do need some basic familiarity with the principles of programming to use. I don't know about how compatible it is with Chessbase/Fritz. One of the chess packages on the UK TeX site is for the en passant fonts mentioned earlier.

[Ian Kingston]

If you have a strong masochistic streak you could investigate LaTeX - it's free and capable of excellent results, but very hard to use.

Everything's relative when you've used it for university mathematics! I have dabbled with it a little bit for chess, having recently used it to produce a new poster for my club. Its clear advantage is in the area of editing, but you do need some basic familiarity with the principles of programming to use. I don't know about how compatible it is with Chessbase/Fritz. One of the chess packages on the UK TeX site is for the en passant fonts mentioned earlier.

Anyone who's used LaTeX and is comfortable with tracking down and installing the relevant packages would probably be OK. Not something to recommend to beginners though!

ChessBase will spit out a plain text file, but that leaves the problem of coding it all up for LaTeX. It ought to be relatively straightforward to convert an RTF file to something usable, but (as you say) some programming skills would be required.

Probably 99% of people will get something acceptable using their favourite word processor, even if it offends typesetting purists. For what it's worth, if I had to typeset a chess book I would use a series of macros to convert the formatting in word processor files to InDesign styles (plain text codes) and then assemble the whole thing in InDesign. But that may be overkill for Tom's needs.

[TomChivers]

Learning LaTex is not implausible for me; some of my colleagues use it and I have a mathematics degree.

But I think in the first instance I'll try to follow Jon D'Souza-Eva's advice.

Thanks for all the responses though!

[Jon D'Souza-Eva]

Ha! Read it and weep, you LaTeX nerds.

[Ian Kingston]

Ha! Read it and weep, you LaTeX nerds.

Fighting talk!

[Christopher Kreuzer]

Ha! Read it and weep, you LaTeX nerds.

The chess magazine at university that I edited for a year (and then another year with a co-editor, this would be 1996-8) was handed on to me after having been typeset using some form of LaTeX. I was just about able to manage, mostly by carefully following the instructions given and by copying bits from the previous files. I do have vague memories, though, of having to use some command to get the whole thing to run properly, and it breaking down because I'd got some small bit wrong. Unsurprisingly, the next set of editors switched to a different typesetting system and software. But it was interesting learning that small amount about LaTeX.